Kirsten Bengtson-Lykoudis spent 10 years as a New York gallery director after teaching Photography and Photo History at the Ringling College of Art and Design. She is the former Director of Steven Kasher Gallery, Howard Schickler Fine Art, and former Associate Director of Edwynn Houk Gallery. While living in New York, she also worked as the Studio Manager for the photographer Clifford Ross. From 2011-13, Bengtson worked at the Mindy Solomon Gallery in downtown St. Petersburg while teaching darkroom and digital photography courses at the State College of Florida in Bradenton. In addition to being an adjunct instructor at St. Petersburg College, she works in the Department of Galleries and Exhibitions at the Ringling College of Art, and manages private photography collections in Sarasota and Miami.

Bengtson-Lykoudis has a Master of Fine Arts degree from USF in Tampa with a concentration in photography, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Minnesota. She also attended New College of Sarasota, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Leningrad. Her areas of expertise include digital and black & white darkroom photography, studio lighting, photo history, contemporary fine art criticism, and black and white pinhole photography.

In 1997, her photographs were published in the Pinhole Journal. After serving as the on-site coordinator for the USF Summer Art Program in Paris, Bengtson taught a darkoom workshop on the Greek island of Samos where she met her husband, Dimitri Lykoudis. A writer and photographer, she has reviewed New York and Miami exhibitions for artslant.com and is currently working on a memoir about her experiences in Greece titled Aegean Blues.